Chapter 17
seventeen
ZACH
I put the spoon down and turned the burner off.
“I read it,” I said.
“I know you read it. It was opened.”
“I read it in the office at the lodge, and I put it in a drawer, and I never answered it.”
“Why?”
There was a reasonable answer sitting right there. I could have told her I’d been married four months and out of my depth and hadn’t wanted to open a door. That is true, and it is also a way of coming out of this better than I have any business coming out of it.
“Because if I wrote back, she’d have written again.”
My wife went very still.
“That’s all,” I said. “Not because it would have hurt you. Not because it was finished and there was nothing left to say. Because answering it would have meant there was something to answer. And then it’s a conversation. And then I’d have had to come home and tell you I was having one.”
She put her hand on the back of a chair and left it there.
“You let her think you were coming back.”
“I didn’t think about what she thought at all.” I made myself say the rest of it. “Which is worse.”
“Yes,” my wife said. “It’s worse.”
She went up. I heard the door, and I heard it not lock, and I sat on the bottom stair for a long while.
I drove up in the morning without calling anybody first.
I had it worked out by the second cattle gate. The whole thing in order, the way you go into a meeting, with the difficult part buried in the middle where it does the least damage.
I didn’t use any of it. You get into the room and the person is sitting there being a person, and the order goes straight out of your head.
Shayna was in the small office they’d given her, with drawings weighted down at the corners by a stapler and somebody’s coffee cup. She looked up and her face did something complicated and then went smooth.
“It’s over,” I said.
She stopped writing.
“It has been over since Jackson. I never told you. I’m telling you now, out loud, to you. Not to your father. Not to my grandmother. Not by getting in a car. And not by answering a letter.”
Her hands went flat on the desk.
“You read it.”
“I read it the week it came.”
She laughed. Once, not kindly, with her eyes closed.
“Four years, Zach.”
“Yes.”
“You could have written just a few words on the back of anything.”
“I know it.”
She got up and went to the window and stood with her back to me. I let her. I have spent my whole life filling a silence, and that one was not mine to fill.
“Do you know the worst of it?” she said.
“I’d have been fine. I’d have been furious for about half a year and then I’d have been fine.
I’d have met somebody. I’d have come to your wedding and been unbearable about the flowers and got on with my life.
” She turned around. “You didn’t take you away from me. You took the ending.”
I didn’t have anything to say to that because I was being honest, to her and to myself.
“The seat’s still yours,” I said. “You’re good and Dan’s right about the Denver firm and none of that has changed. But I’ve told my wife what it looked like from where she was standing, and I’m not going to stand here and pretend to you that it looked like nothing.”
“I’m not taking it.”
“Shayna.”
“I’m not taking it.” She started shuffling around papers that probably didn’t need shuffling. “I can’t stand in a room with your wife and talk about door handles. I like her. That isn’t going to be possible now, and I’d rather be the one who says so.”
“What will you tell your father?”
“The truth.” No weight on it at all. “He’ll do whatever he does with it.”
I got as far as the door before she said my name. She was back at the drawings when I turned around.
“She asked me straight, you know. Your wife. Standing in the great room at first light with a tray in her hands like it wasn’t the bravest thing she could do.” She didn’t look up. “Nobody in your family has ever asked me anything straight in their lives.”
Dan got me at the trucks before I made the gate.
“What have you said to my daughter?”
“That it was finished. I should have said it years ago and I didn’t.”
He looked at me a long time. Dan Lemont has a way of going quiet that costs money.
“And the design seat?”
“She’s turned it down.”
“You put her in the position and now she’s turning it down?”
“I did.”
“You could tell me it’s a misunderstanding,” he said. “I’d take it. We’d both take it. We’d have a drink about it, the paper would go through, and not one person would ever mention it again.” He waited. He actually waited, with his hand on the door of my truck. “Go on, then.”
And I stood there in the cold and didn’t.
That is the only thing I did right in four years, and it took me until then to do it.
“You’re a fool,” Dan spat.
“Probably.”
“I’m pulling our stake.”
“I know.”
Magda was at the desk with her list. She’d heard before I got up the steps, because she always has.
“He’ll be back within the year. Dan is a sulker.”
“He might not, though.”
“No.” She put her pen down. “He might not.”
I sat in my grandfather’s chair.
“You’ve cost this family a partnership over a simple conversation, Zachary.”
“Yes.”
“Your grandfather would have found a way to have both.”
“He would.”
“And he would have been wrong.” She said it so quietly I nearly lost it. “I told myself for forty years that your grandfather was managing things. He was avoiding them. I let him do it, because the house stayed pleasant.”
I looked at her.
“Don’t look at me like that. I am not doing your absolution for you, Zachary. I am extremely annoyed with you.”
She let that sit. Then she straightened the list that did not need straightening, and I watched an old woman work out how to ask a question.
“Is Lydia all right?”
Nobody had asked me that. Not one person in that house had asked me that once.
“No,” I said.
“Ah,” said my grandmother. And she put her glasses on and looked at her list and did not look at me.
I got home before dark. She was in the hall.
She’d taken everything off the table by the door and put it all on the floor, and she was standing there with her arms folded looking at the wall like it had said something to her.
“What are you doing?”
“Your grandmother asked me if I’d ever thought about doing something with this hall.” She didn’t turn around. “I’ve thought about it every day for two years.”
I put my keys down on the floor, because there was nowhere else to put them.
“Where were you?”
“Up at the lodge.”
And she waited.
She stood there and gave me all the room in the world to hand it over. Shayna. Dan. The stake. My grandmother’s face. Everything the day had cost me, delivered to my wife in the hall of our own house while she was standing in front of me needing something.
“I said the thing I should have said,” I told her. “I told her straight to her face that it was over—that it’s been over.”
“Why now? Why bother?”
I shrugged. “Because I owed it to her. And that’s all I’ll say about it.”
She sat with that and looked at me for a long moment. “This whole time you could’ve just been honest with me. And with her. And you weren’t. What do you think I should do with that?”
It’s usually not a problem for me to give Lydia an answer. But I did not have one for her.